


Wake Up

by EnglishLanguage



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: (mentions of) program culture and biology, Alan being Alan, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Non-Human Humanoid Society, Protective Tron, Self-Esteem Issues, The Grid, Tron has PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 01:48:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19075015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage
Summary: Tron and Alan run into trouble on the Grid.





	Wake Up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CyberSearcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberSearcher/gifts), [that_runneth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_runneth/gifts).



> This is for CyberSearcher, who constantly feeds our little fandom with awesome stories about Alan and Tron.  
> This is also for that_runneth, who submitted the very kind comment on Mea Culpa that ultimately inspired me to write this.
> 
> Thank you both for being amazing! :)
> 
>  
> 
> From Mea Culpa:  
> "[Tron will] wake up when he’s good and ready... Or if you’re in danger. He’ll wake up then, too."

I.

Tron falters.

Alan’s brain notices the fact before his body does.

With a double-take, he tries to stumble backward; his feet tangle themselves up with inertia and trip to a halt on the road. “Tron?” The disc on Alan’s back bleeps faintly, almost morosely, with what Tron described as a location report.

A location report is... an odd combination of a map and a text message, in essence. Tron installed some modification for it on Alan’s disc that creates noise whenever the report updates with information of ‘importance.’ Programs, apparently, do not require the auditory notification to notice an update. What's more, they don't need to access and read their discs to view the information.

Alan isn’t entirely sure what this alternative method would entail (he suspects the notifications feed straight into programs' minds), but he fully intends to ask later.

_“Tron.”_

The program still refuses to reply. Where he stands, immersed in the shadows of unlit buildings, Tron’s dark silhouette drips into the fabric of the Grid. Alan can’t quite make out the edges of his program—where Tron ends and the Grid begins—but he manages to pick out scant light reflecting off the plates of Tron's armor in contorted lines and whorls, sleek as water, and narrow circuits glistening white-hot, molten and nearly damp.

The patterns of sparse illumination show that Tron has one hand draped over his shoulder (halfway reaching for a disc), and his head cocked to the side, intent.

Listening to something Alan can’t hear? Or contemplating something Alan can’t see?

Lacking anything productive to do and anxious to quell his skittering unease, Alan reaches back for his own disc, tugs it off its dock, and activates the user interface. A jumbled mass of holographic code flits into existence just above the weapon, offering up diagrams, strange statistics, a written message that seems to contain travel recommendations...

Some form of order presides over the presentation of the data, that much is clear—but Alan has no idea how to begin interpreting it.

_‘You are in Sector 12_D3, Tron City proper.’_

Sighing, he exhales mounting tension out of his chest, only for his lungs to constrict again on his next, too shallow inhale. “Tron, is there anything here you want to show me in this sector, or—”

“Please stand by.”

Alan tries to reconcile himself with the idea of 'standing by.' It doesn’t appeal.

This sector of the Grid is industrial. In other words: austere, inhospitable, lit only by two circuits demarcating the edges of the road. Silent. Alan's footsteps don't echo.

That last fact, in specific, carries a certain _stench_ of claustrophobia; the shadows cast by the monolithic towers looming above him seem to take up space, smother sound. The darkness is substantial, as heavy as the buildings themselves, enough so that Alan suspects he'll drown here if he stays still for too long. But Tron wouldn’t bring him here, especially on foot, if the sector weren’t secure—Alan centers himself around that fact, even if he’s far less than willing to simply stand and wait.

“Alan_One?”

“Alan.”

“Alan,” Tron corrects himself. “Approximately three-eighths of a millicycle remain before the portal reopens. We will wait for it in Sector 2_A.”

Alan blinks, fidgets with his disc. “I thought Sector 3 was closest to the portal.”

“That is... correct.” Tron drops to a knee, patterns of light sliding over the arc of his back, and presses a hand to the ground. The skeletal light lines on his fingers flare. “There is unrest in the city.”

_Unrest._

Alan’s stomach attempts a nervous flip, fails miserably, and collapses halfway through the maneuver with a sickening sort of thump. The tour of the city, he figures, is over; as it is, he’s already noted down sufficient information to help Sam add on a few sectors from the outside world.  

“You would not be safe in Sector 3,” Tron asserts. “And I don’t plan to take you to the sector where every program on the Grid most expects a user to be.”

The strategy seems sound, but Alan associates Sector 3 with safety, familiarity, escape…

“How close to us is this ‘unrest?’”

“Far.” A bizarre noise shivers its way out of Tron’s helmet. After a second, Alan realizes it was meant to be a _laugh,_ albeit inelegantly snorted and muffled by the helmet. “No combatants will reach this sector before we vacate it. The threat, however, is still within range,” Tron explains, matter-of-fact.

Or—his voice is not _exactly_ ‘matter-of-fact.’ Alan struggles to find an adjective to describe it and finally decides Tron’s words seem disturbed. Off-center, somehow, with atypical phrasing and cadence. Monotonous, but more hollow.

Robotic.

Tron’s hand and the narrow circuits on it, sprawled over the road, contract—sudden and sharp—, forming a grotesque and elongated shape out of Tron’s fingers. It resembles a glowing spider, maybe, coiled and stick-limbed and venomous, neon white-blue.

Alternatively, the shape could be a segment of machinery. Fractured, mangled, deposited on the road to bleed toxins and corrosion into the darkness...

Or, otherwise, it’s just a severed (twitching) hand, abandoned by its owner.

After all, the complete lack of circuits on Tron’s wrists and forearms creates the illusion of a bleak disconnect between his illuminated fingers and elbows.

Alan puts a hard stop to his morbid creativity. The dead quiet of the sector, he reasons, must be chafing on his nerves.

“We should—” Tron cuts himself off, pauses again to stare at nothing.

“What are you doing?”

“Scanning,” the program states. “We should proceed on lightcycles.”

It takes too long, in the obscurity of the sector, for Alan to realize Tron is waiting for a response, head tilted at a sharp angle that could be considered either obliging or impatient. Without seeing Tron’s face, Alan can’t be certain; and in all honesty, he doesn’t know if he’d be capable of reading the answer off the program's face, either.

“Alright. I’ll follow you, Tron.”

On the other side of the computer screen, Alan wouldn’t have thought twice about Tron’s reaction. (The program stands immediately after Alan’s confirmation, posture stiff and abrupt and hurriedly compliant.) A user puts a command into a computer; the program responds in direct subsequence. Rinse and repeat.

That sort of impersonal response would make sense if programs were truly immaterial, limited existences, with their functionality completely dependent upon and awaiting a user’s demands. But Alan has come to expect emotion from Tron, and interactions, and careful deliberations. He finds none of that humanity now in Tron’s detached haste.

“Tron, is something wrong?”

The monitor freezes in place, baton in hand, complaisant to a _fault…_

“There is unrest in the city.”

“I know.” Tron already said as much, word for word. “I’m asking if something is wrong with you. You seem… on edge.”

“I am operational.”

The sentence warps, at the end, beneath a strange, rattling noise. Like a corroded version of Tron's ambient hum, it emanates from the vicinity of the program's chest, stops as suddenly as it started.

And Alan cringes, heart twisting sharply with an old and deeply—almost painfully—ingrained instinct for concern. He’s felt the itch of it before with Jethro, his own son, and with Sam, and understands the feeling well enough to know he’s missing some crucial implication to Tron’s mechanical, _broken_ behavior. “You don’t need to lie to protect me,” he tries. “Are—are we really safe here, or did you just say that to reassure…?”

The rattle picks up again, louder and harsher.

“I would not lie to you, Alan_One.” There’s no point in trying to correct him. This time, Tron used Alan’s title very deliberately.

 

Tron doesn’t speak again—not until they leave the dark skein of buildings behind them. Not until the oppressive gloom of Sector 12 dissipates in the forceful brilliance of the main city, visible from miles away.

The system monitor skids to a rapid stop on an overlook, straddling his lightcycle. Alan follows suit.

They haven’t, technically, left 12, and the brilliant skyscrapers and busy streets of Tron City are still a distant promise. Alan notes they provide a _dual-edged_ promise as well: where there's safety in numbers for the two of them, there's also safety for their intended assailants.

And yet, from their vantage on a hill surmounting and sloping down toward Tron City, Alan decides he would much rather be somewhere with people than here, alone. This isn’t the first view of Tron City from a distance that Alan has witnessed, but it’s the first time he’s ever fully appreciated the beauty and power of the sheer volume of life thriving within it.

Which has a lot to do with the fact that this isn’t the first time he’s faced a security threat while on the Grid, but it is the first time he’s seen Tron so agitated.

Kaleidoscopic lights—silver and white and neon green-blue—choke the blackness out of the city, extending into the sky in a translucent dome of light pollution. Bright colors paint over windows and swarming roads and massive screens on the outsides of buildings.

Alan feels the shadows of 12 lapping against his spine and shudders.

“You’re not tackling me to the ground, so I assume we’re still safe,” he teases, grim.

Tron affords him a brief side-glance, then shrugs, almost imperceptibly. Quirking his stance to one side, Tron leans the whole of his own weight and his vehicle's bulk against one leg. His hands clutch the handlebars of the machine with livid strength, _strangulating_ them. “Sector 2_A is located to the left of Sector 3. There’s a building, taller than the others, colored green. Do you see it?”

The ‘could you get to it on your own, if we were separated?’ remains unspoken.

“Yes,” Alan confirms. “I see it.”

“That’s our destination. We will exit this sector and enter Sector 5.” The program gestures to a cluster of structures, as uninhabited and defunct in appearance as Sector 12, standing between them and their destination at Sector 2. “I’ve called for a full blackout of Sector 5 to cover our passage. Remain close to me, unless I say otherwise. If I tell you to go on without me, you _go.”_

“I assume the lightcycles will stay lit.”

“It’s the only way you’ll be able to see,” Tron admits, with some displeasure. “Otherwise, I would cover our lights, as well.” Behind his visor, Tron’s eyes seem to sweep over Alan’s body—or, more accurately, Alan’s clothing. Compared to Tron, Alan is illuminated like a Christmas tree, circuits purely white in evidence of his identity as a user.

The program revs his lightcycle, beckons Alan to follow suit with a vague nod.

The roar of their vehicles, as they descend the hill, isn’t nearly loud enough to block out the unstable hitch and tick of Tron’s fragmented growl. Alan, out of courtesy and an understanding of their need to hurry, chooses not to comment on it.

 

* * *

 

II.

“Are you okay, Tron?” Alan asks, stalled beside his program in an alleyway, waiting for an unspecified _something_ to occur (likely a confirmation of clearance from Tron’s security team) before they continue.

 

“Are you okay?” he asks, standing in the courtyard of a building with the appearance of a warehouse, collapsing his lightcycle back into a baton.

 

“I’m not joking, Tron; I need to know if… No, you’re not okay.” Alan wraps his hand around Tron’s elbow, and the program _snaps._ Tron’s left shoulder slams into the wall of the elevator, and he stiffens all over in a sort of permanent flinch. Alan suppresses a sigh and lets go with all the slow caution he neglected when grabbing Tron in the first place. “Something is wrong. Very wrong,” he asserts, and the fact that he’s holding his hands in the air like he’s under arrest is clear proof of it. “Something is weighing on you, more than usual. I can see it. _Talk_ to me.”

The floor count on the elevator increases with a shrill beep (they’re five stories above ground level, now, with two more to go) and Tron jerks his helmeted face up, away from Alan, to stare at the screen displaying the number.  

“I’m worried about you, Tron. I want to help.”

“Why?”

“Pardon—are you asking me why I want to help you?” Alan squints at Tron, confused and worried and more than a little flustered by the entire situation.

Another floor passes by.

“No.” Tron bites the word out of the swollen purr rattling in his chest; still straight as a board, he swivels around to glare at Alan. “Why are you worried? _I_ fight for the users. Your prerogative is to protect yourself, not to worry about me.”

Alan’s squinting metamorphoses rapidly, first into widened eyes and raised eyebrows, then into an incredulous, uncontrolled gape. Heavens, he’s wearing his emotions on his sleeve like a _Flynn_ , but the sheer bewilderment roiling in his skull is too much to contain. “That’s ridiculous.”

Tron’s growl stutters, turns upward in a parody of a question.

“You’re my program. My friend, my…” It’s habit to slip his glasses off his nose and polish them on his jacket when he’s perturbed, if only because heavy, distressed breaths tend to fog up the glass at the edges.

However, Alan doesn’t need glasses on the Grid, as his digitized DNA seems to surpass the normal kind at proper human functioning. Resultantly, he bats ineffectively at his glasses-less face; eventually, he grips his nose between his fingers in a vain effort to collect himself.

“You’re like my son, Tron. Like Sam was to Kevin. I don’t have the option to not worry.”

Tron settles on a weighted and precarious silence, as if the program is gnawing off his tongue just to hold back his rebuttal.

“I’d like to clarify that even if I had an option, I’d still choose to worry about you. And I’m not going to stop worrying until you let me know what’s bothering you. Why…” Alan throws up a hand, frustrated. “Why you’re taking all these extra precautions. Why you’re tailing me instead of running off to risk your life, as you do. Why you’re acting like a robot.”

“Sam never told you.”

“I… what?”

Tron’s growl surges, intensifies into a series of coarse, disconnected rattles, like the program is retching on loop. His next attempt at producing words doesn’t come out at all. Dipping his chin against his chest, Tron collapses wearily into the wall, seemingly resigned to wait for the noise to die down, and for the first time, Alan wonders if the odd snarl might be more of a problem than he initially suspected.

It sounds painful, hoarse and _wrong_ and grating. As if metal parts are shaking loose in Tron’s chest. 

Alan forces himself not to think too much about that comparison—Tron’s growl like gargled steel, his demeanor like a broken android—and resolves to ask Sam about it later.

“He ne-ever told you a-aAabout-t...” Tron gives up on speech with a sharp shake of his head.

This time, when Alan reaches out to touch, the program doesn’t shy away. Precise, Alan positions his fingertips on the circuit nestled in the bend of Tron’s elbow, just as he would if he were taking a pulse. Programs don’t have hearts or heart rates to measure, but Alan has seen Sam check on Tron or Quorra’s wellbeing with a two-fingered touch to either program’s circuits. Faint warmth pulses gently beneath the pads of Alan’s fingers, but he doesn’t know what to make of the temperature or of the rhythm of its ebb and flow.

Apparently, skill in program diagnostics is not intuitive to users.

“Sam is very careful with your privacy,” Alan states slowly, words crawling cautious from the depths of his brain. “So he hasn’t told me much of anything, no.”

“I understand,” Tron begins, testing out his voice. The low snarl persists, dragging in an undercurrent beneath Tron’s speech, but the program can speak again, at least—even if the effort it requires of him weighs down every one of Tron’s words. “ _Clu’s_ regime, the Occupation,” Tron grits out, "used extensive propaganda against user-rs and user supporters. Some programs would prefer the Grid to return to the control of the Occupation. They want to catch yo-u. If they do, they will not der-r-rez you.”

“No?”

“The-ey will tea-r-Rr you _apar-rt._ ” His voice sounds soaked in blood. Tron’s fists curl tighter around his discs, and Alan imagines him wringing the dark fluid out of the unlit weapons, too. “ _That_ is what the Occupation does to the people it catches.”

(They _are_ in the Grid, however, so Alan’s vivid imagination unconsciously drops its copper-red tinge in favor of more neon colors.)

“You were held prisoner by this... Occupation. And Sam.” That, and a select few details, make up the extent of Alan’s knowledge regarding his program, his godson, and their time in the Grid.

Tron nods decisively. “Clu caught Kevin Flynn, too.” If Alan didn’t know better, he could almost interpret Tron’s tone as goading. The wording of the statement would be grim by itself, but Tron’s already frigid voice worsens it, warps the program’s statement into something harsh and ugly. “It was a differ-rent prison than mi-i-ine. Flynn had the entire Gr-Rrrid to hi-mself, but he was _tr-rapped._ It to-Rrre him apart.”

Tight fury ignites in Alan’s chest.

“H-e became tired and weak here, and he der-r-rezed here.”

Hissing a curse, Alan looks straight into Tron’s helmet, guesses as to where the program’s eyes are located, and stares him down. “So help me, Tron, you better have an excellent reason for saying this. It's _cruel._ ”

“In the entir-irety of my r-Rr-runtime, I have ne-everr been able to protect a u-Uu-ser from the Occupation.”

It isn’t callousness rotting deep inside Tron, leaking out of him in putrid hysteria, leaving him cold and hollow.

It’s _self-hatred._

_Fear._

“I will not a-Aallow it to h-appen again.”

Alan’s anger gutters out as quickly as it burst to life inside him. “Tron.” He relaxes his grip on Tron’s elbow, belatedly realizing the bruising force with which he was holding and possibly hurting the program, _his_ program. “ _Tron_ , you tried your hardest.”

Alan knows it, in the very depths of his heart, through the center of each bone in his body.

He knows it as if he were looking into a mirror, staring down a reflection of his own perseverance. For the first time, he understands what Sam means when he claims a program is an extension of a user's mind.

“They suffer-r-red.”

“You suffered,” Alan counters. He tries to argue the point, tries to channel his piercing sorrow into every sound that slips off his tongue. Instead, his voice comes out frail and limping. “And you’re still suffering. You’re still torturing yourself. I don’t understand why—” Alan’s voice breaks off with a gasp. He doesn’t often lose his composure, but when he does, he loses it _completely._

“You tried your hardest,” he reaffirms. “And that’s enough. Tron, I wrote you to be a protector, not to be… perfect.”

Under Alan’s fingers, Tron’s circuitry runs colder than it should. Alan’s own heart flutters inside his chest, weak and wounded, and he feels algid, anxious sweat beading at the nape of his neck and across his chest. But if they truly are in this much danger—enough to entirely dismantle Tron’s ironclad control over his emotions—then they probably shouldn’t be lingering in an elevator that stopped running minutes ago.

“We need to move,” Tron finally decides. It’s a non-sequitur, yes, but Alan can hardly criticize it when he was thinking of saying the same thing.

Dislodging Alan’s hand from his elbow, Tron pulls forward into the hallway, the elevator doors automatically opening to let them through. The tiles on the floor outside the elevator register the presence of two lifeforms and illuminate themselves, glistening with a clinical, white light; Alan balks from the sudden brightness as he follows behind Tron.

“What is this place?”

“Vacant space,” Tron replies, flattening one palm against a door—rather, a solid sheet of metal, without so much as a handle, set in the wall. “Unused area for data storage. It will be difficult for anyone to find us here.”

“So we _are_ hiding in a warehouse.” Somewhat irrationally, Alan notes that this situation is exactly the kind of problem Sam would get himself into. Considering how often Sam visits the Grid and what Alan knows about the virulent persistence of radical terrorist cells, it’s actually quite likely that Sam and Tron have lived through this exact scenario before. Once, at least, maybe twice. Maybe more.

Maybe not as severe as this go-around, however.

“All other areas of the city were unsuitable. Most sectors have been compromised.”

“Oh, it’s serious then,” Alan jokes, squashing down the fear bubbling up inside him. " _Now_ I understand."

The door finally disintegrates around Tron’s hand, and the program waves Alan into a large, windowless, and completely empty room. Behind them, the door materializes back into place.

Tron sighs, but his helmet distorts the hum into low static. “Insurgent groups get bolder when a user visits the Grid. It’s serious, yes—" and of course Tron responds to attempted humor with solemn reassurance; Alan would do the same— "but nothing that the security suite can't handle.”

In a mockery of relaxation, Tron falls back against the wall beside the door. Alan briefly assesses one of the many pillars holding up the ceiling in rows, then finally tries to replicate Tron’s position. His disc, of course, hits the pillar before any other part of him does, jolting him off balance.

“These _discs_ are impractical,” he grumbles, unfastening the thing. It hangs loosely in his hand, fitting the curve of his palm well enough while he’s awake… but Alan is exhausted, overworked and running on the fumes of adrenaline. If he falls asleep now, he’ll drop the disc and leave himself vulnerable.

His dependence on this weapon rubs him the wrong way, straight down to his soul.

“Alan,” Tron begins, and Alan waits for the inevitable ‘_One.’ It never comes. “You’re tired.”

“I am.”

“Sleep.” Gentleness breaks through Tron’s sternness, trickling through the cracks. It manifests in the half-softened, reluctant inflection of the command and in the sideways tilt of Tron’s head. “There… is no bed, but Sam always says the floor is an adequate alternative.”

Sam, Alan declines to mention, maintains a number of inaccurate ideas about what exactly constitutes good, healthy sleep. But Alan isn’t picky, and the floor almost seems appealing; he allows himself to slide down to the floor and, re-positioning his disc in his lap, tip his head back against the wall.

“I’ll keep watch,” Tron offers.

“No.” Alan’s eyes shoot open again, startled, and he sits upright. “No, you need to sleep, too. Your circuits are dim.” In the elevator, they felt lukewarm to the touch, like something dead and slowly cooling. Alan scrubs his fingers against the front of his shirt to rid himself of the memory of the sensation. “You haven’t consumed any energy since Sector 8; don’t even dare _think_ that I somehow forgot about that.”

“I need to make sure…”

“You can’t do anything effectively when you’re half-starved and falling asleep on your feet. We’ll be fine.” Realistically, Alan has no chance of convincing Tron. He tries for a compromise. “Can you power down partially? Or scan passively? Would that let you take a break?”

“Yes.”

Tron did say he wouldn’t lie, though his clear aversion to the idea sit, twisted, in the set of the program’s shoulders, hunching him forward.

“Is that an order, Alan?”

It sounds like a test. Beyond all reason, Alan knows it isn’t; some aspect of willing surrender in the query, or maybe the use of Alan’s real name, indicates otherwise. Tron would permit Alan to give him orders. Regardless, Alan would prefer not to. “It’s a request.” His eyelids drop down—Alan shakes himself awake, deliberately blinking. “Please, Tron.”

“You sound like Sam.”

Alan tugs his eyes open again. A sudden, _visible_ calm perfuses Tron’s entire body, and Alan feels amusement crinkle up the corners of his eyes. Of course the thought of Sam would reassure Tron. The two of them are very close to each other, and Alan has learned not to ask—Sam mentioned something about an 'ocean fishing' incident, Tron expressed his desire not to talk about it, and that was the end of the conversation. 

“I sound like Sam," Alan murmurs, which is a bizarre thing to be proud of. "Good.” Through half-lidded eyes, he watches the lights around them—burning in circuits on the walls, radiating from the entire floor—extinguish entirely, or at least darken from garish white to dusky blue. The lights on Tron’s circuits dwindle, too, receding from his elbows and torso. Pulsing softly, the emblem set at the base of Tron’s throat dims.

Satisfied, Alan lets himself drift off...

 

… and wakes up to a nagging itch in his throat.

He's thirsty. The sensation registers as an annoyance, not a pressing concern. Alan tries to swallow it down.

The inflammation just snags on the ridges of his throat, clogging his throat and urging him to cough… “Oh, da-” He presses his lips firmly together as the cough struggles to escape him. Standing, swaying on his feet, Alan smothers his face into his elbow and tries letting it out slowly, quietly. The attempt only aggravates his need; in the end, Alan spews out an abrasive rasp of a cough, rubbing a fist over his chest.

A quick look around the room dispels the uneasy feeling of _‘what’s going on’_ that’s bouncing around his brain. Blinking through the tired ache in his eyes, Alan sees pitch black corners, auxiliary lighting flooding the room with dim cerulean, Tron propped up by the entrance in a straight slant that would make rubble out of a user’s joints…

He remembers that they’re in hiding.

(Looking back, Alan won’t know what persuaded him to do it—)

He crosses over to the wall on the opposite end of the room, steadying himself against it, and recalls a trick Sam taught him the last time the two of them were on the Grid together. The first step is to acknowledge the idea that the solid surface beneath his palm is code: malleable, changeable, as material or immaterial as he desires it to be. Next, Alan… _pulls_ … at some unnamed motivation within him—brainpower, maybe, or perhaps the sheer concentration of his creative will. He pictures a window, glossy and transparent. He pictures the far-off glow of the city creeping into the room, sketching slick reflections onto walls and floor. He pictures the brittle smoothness of glass under his hand.

Radiating out from Alan’s palm, fine sections of pixels glitter at the edges, transmuting into a clear material, and a window appears before him. It ranges from one corner of the wall to the other, from roof to floor.

But the first thing Alan notices isn’t the city—why would he, when those lights are so far away and the patchy incandescence of programs'circuits are so close?

There are a dozen of them at least, congregated at the base of the building, glowing a vehement red that muddies the green-blue shadows of the streets. From inside the building, Alan is unable to hear them. He would never have known they were outside if he hadn’t looked on a whim.

_There are programs outside._

_We're under attack._

His brain repeats it and repeats again. He's aware of his thoughts racing, trying to understand how these programs found their refuge, and he’s even more aware that he should be thinking about most anything else. He should be thinking about running away or alerting Tron...

Alan’s throat clenches shut. He can’t cry out.

He can’t _breathe._

Two of the programs are lugging a platform—a black, flattened square, seemingly heavy—between them. Alan doesn’t know what it is, but it has to be something bad. A threat.

Alan’s heartbeat thunders in his skull and blurs into white noise, deafening and blinding him, so he doesn’t quite understand why his entire body is twisting, feet slipping out from underneath him. _What’s going on? What’s happening?_

Disoriented, he clings to a pressure wrapped painfully around his ribs—

“Tron,” he gasps, feels textured leather graze his chin and cover his eyes—

And the world tears apart around him.

 

Alan comes to on hands and knees, slumped into a gloved hand cupped over his eyes. Even through the dark material, splintered green afterimages of blinding light eclipse his vision.

Now he understands—a bomb went off.

It occurs to him that he can’t hear past a keen ringing in his ears; he can’t breathe through the deafening echo of the boom that’s lodged in his bones like calcification. A massive weight ( _Tron?_ ) shifts off of his back, and without it pinning him in place, Alan tips onto his side, every atom in his body out of place.

He gets a moment of relative peace and silence as he mentally claws his way through the tinnitus that wraps around his head like a web, constricting, sharp and painful, around his brain. Then, a different sort of shriek digs needles into his eardrums.

Alan can’t stand it. He flips onto his stomach and vomits.

The noise refuses to stop; instead, it worsens, becoming a series of arrhythmic crashes _on top_ of the fluctuating shrieks.

Not shrieks.

_Voices._

There are voices—both periodic shouts and staticky, corroded wails—inside the shrieking. There are people _screaming_ outside.

Alan pushes himself up, searching for Tron. The room is empty, so far as he can turn his neck to inspect it, littered with voxels and torn completely open on one end. The wall nearest to him, he realizes, is gone. Destroyed. The explosion stripped away the entire front of the building…

Seven stories down, crimson voxels split around the blazing edge of a disc and shower the ground in a gruesome, smoking splatter. Tron’s disc ricochets off a building across the street and cuts another enemy program across the chest.

Alan buries his face into an arm and breathes through his nausea, a litany of mewling expletives slipping through gritted teeth. He knows he ought to move. It’s basic common sense; he’s being attacked, so he should be on his feet, making some effort to defend himself. Every time Alan orders his limbs to cooperate, though, reality caves in around him and he loses awareness of his surroundings. Loses awareness of his body, too, what with its useless, trembling limbs and aching joints.

He fights to keeps track of time by counting flinches—one, minute shudder for every scream he hears that cuts out halfway through.

He’s safe. He’s _safe_ ; Tron will protect him. It should be strange how simple it is to convince himself of the fact, but Alan wrote Tron to be the best darned independent security software known to man. Never mind that the program lacks confidence in himself, Tron is Alan’s counterpart and Alan trusts him.

Alan is safe.

Tron’s first reaction to an explosion, after all, was to shield Alan’s body with his own.

 

* * *

 

III.

Tron reappears when everything is quiet again, kneeling beside Alan with the scuff of armored knees on hard floors.

“Alan_One?”

Alan rakes in a slow inhale, chest clenching.

“Alan?”

“I’m alright.”

That's a lie. He thinks he's in shock.

Ridges of leather catch on his jaw as Tron takes Alan’s chin in one gloved hand, tilting it up. Tron’s fingers dab at a bruise on his cheek and come away smeared with congealing blood—Alan, strangely, hadn’t noticed the injury. He raises his own hand to brush over the scrape, feeling crusted fluids and sore wetness at the center of the injury.

“They found us.”

“I know,” Tron growls. Dry, blistering _fury_ peels from the program’s voice. “They had an informant.”

“Who?”

Grimacing, Tron shakes his head.

“You don’t know.” Alan pulls Tron’s hand away from his face. Albeit shaken, he can hold himself up on his own. “So what do we do n—  _Tron!_ ” His stomach lurches. “You’re _hurt._ ”

Tron looks down at himself, inspects chasms of fractured voxels spiraling around his torso, a dark pit (glitching, flashing white) at the base of his ribs— “I won’t derez—” and wipes a rivulet of liquified code from the shattered skin at his temple.

There’s something else different about him.

Alan shifts his gaze from the monitor’s head to his knees and all the way back up before it occurs to him: Tron’s helmet is down. It’s his own face staring at him, for crying out loud, and Alan kicks himself internally for not noticing sooner.

“What happened to your helmet?”

Face locking in a muted scowl, Tron averts his gaze and shrugs with a tense roll of his shoulders.

“Does this mean—” Alan wets his lips with a tongue, tastes caked dust and bitter vomit. “Does this mean I’m allowed to look at you now? You wouldn’t let me see your face before.”

Hesitant, the program’s eyes meet Alan’s in a brief flicker, flit to the side and back again, trying to hide and gauge Alan’s thoughts all at once.

“Tron.” Alan reconsiders his approach—hazy suspicion pricks at his heart, and he hopes, pleads _,_ that he’s incorrect— “How about this: _you’re_ allowed to look at _me.”_

Tron gawks. Except—he still isn’t looking at Alan, so Tron gawks at absolutely nothing, his expression so riveted on the middle distance that Alan genuinely wonders if the program is starting to zone out, unable to process the situation.

Eventually, Tron sighs, grits out a terse “I failed you.”

Alan’s heart sinks. “Well, now—that’s not entirely accurate, is it? I’m still alive. Uninjured, for the most part.”

Unlike Tron, who’s more of a coil of ribbons than a whole program at this point, what with the lacerations weaving around his torso and the fractures riddling his legs (from jumping off a seven-story building, Alan reasons, and he thanks the Grid that programs are far more durable than users).

“You saved me,” Alan insists, fiercely determined, as if he has the power to  _burn_ the dejection out of Tron.

“They shouldn't have been able to find you.”

“They shouldn’t have planned to murder someone in the first place,” Alan parries. “You can’t win this argument.”

Tron’s head dips further toward the ground until he’s nearly bowing before Alan. Ironically, the submissive position almost comes across a challenge, enough so that Alan deflates under the weight of Tron’s stubbornness, sighing loudly. “For all the theories I’ve thought up of from what Sam’s told me, I don’t know who, precisely, destroyed your sense of worth. Or how they managed it.”

Tron quivers, exactly once.

Alan has to forcibly suppress a shiver of his own. One of his worst fears is that it was him, and his coding, that turned Tron into a damaged, traumatized revenant of a hero. The thought that Alan somehow programmed Tron to perpetually run himself into the ground, to hate his imperfections, shakes the very foundations of Alan’s being.

“You matter, Tron. You matter to _me._ You deserve to be proud of what you’ve done, and of who you are.”

“And who am I to you, Alan_One?” Tron questions thinly.

“My equal. No one can ever strip that value from you.” An unwieldy breath shakes a storm into Alan’s lungs, leaving him lightheaded. “After all, we’re both kneeling. Aren’t we?”

More from shock than anything else, Tron’s eyes snap up to Alan’s face, the corners of his mouth and eyes pulled tight.

“Think about it, alright?” Alan’s own smile feels uncomfortably stiff on his face. “But we have other concerns now,” he sighs. “Primarily—you’re injured. Can I do anything to fix that?”

“You can’t expend all of your power out here. You’ll exhaust yourself. It’s not safe.”

Alan detests himself for it, but his brain recognizes the logic in Tron’s dismissal. What’s more, the sooner they move on, the sooner they’ll find someplace where Tron _does_ feel safe enough to request aid. “I understand. But, Tron—” He tacks on the question as an afterthought. “You were asleep, weren’t you? When we were attacked?”

“Mostly.”

Alan shakes his head, bewildered. “I couldn’t tell anyone was outside. Could you?”

“No.”

“Then how did you manage to wake up, cross the entire room, and pull me away from the explosion, all before I even realized what was happening?”

“You were afraid,” Tron says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I detected your fear. I knew I had to protect you.”

 


End file.
